Day 11: Give Me Waffles or Give me Death!

September 14: In the morning, I headed up to the third floor of the hotel where breakfast was being served. Or at least provided. You have to help yourself, really. There wasn’t a lot of serving going on, but I didn’t expect that either.

 

To my delight, they had the little make-it-yourself waffle machines which were primed and ready to go with two choices of waffle mix—the “spice” or “original” flavor. I did one of both! This was such a fancy hotel, they not only had one waffle maker, but two of them! I only used one of them, though, making the waffles one at a time so they’d be hot and fresh when I was ready to eat. =)

 

I got my fill, brushed my teeth, then it was time to do some laundry. I walked to the laundromat while Amanda drove there, then we spent some time figuring out how the place worked since it used cards to run everything rather than coins. We’d never been to a laundromat set up like this and there was a learning curve involved!

 

Then, while my laundry was going, I headed next door to the supermarket to do some grocery shopping. I decided to walk all the way to Stowe for my next resupply—about 100 miles up the trail that I figured would take as long as ten days—so I had a lot of food I needed to buy. Heavy food. Oh, yeah, heavy…

By the time I finished, my clothes had been washed and we headed back to the hotel where I laid out my clothes to dry. We didn’t dry them at the laundromat because nothing was made of cotton so they would have dried pretty darned quick regardless.

 

Then Amanda and I went our separate ways. I wanted to head to the WalMart to pick up a couple of items I couldn’t find at the supermarket then go back to the hotel and work on my blog entries so you could keep reading them every other day even though I’d be offline for as long as ten consecutive days. Amanda wouldn’t be caught dead in a WalMart and had funner things to do than watch me blog.

 

But we got together again for dinner where we headed out to the Ponderosa Steakhouse, then she kidnapped me to go to a letterbox on a long drive out of town. I wanted to get back to the motel to keep working on the blogs, but Amanda forced me to go out to find a letterbox at a rest area outside of town.

 

Then we headed back into town for the night where I ended my first zero day of the hike. =) Not a particularly exciting day, but a pleasant one!

 

Apparently, John Deere was born in Rutland. Who knew?!

 

Poor Harry…

 

Mural in Rutland

 

This is what they do to dogs in Rutland?!

 

Sign and toymaker store